Social Gospel Apostle

The Kingdom Is Always but Coming: A Life of Walter Rauschenbusch
Eerdmans (Library of Religious Biography series), 2004
(348 pages, $25.00, paperback)

reviewed by Eric Miller

At first glance, Walter Rauschenbusch’s life and times seem worlds
away from ours. An American theologian and historian who lived from 1861 to
1918, he emerged in the first decade of the twentieth century as an eminent,
impassioned advocate for what became known as the “social gospel.” He
insisted, in chorus with Washington Gladden, Josiah Strong, and others, that
in the face of the unprecedented social and economic convulsions of the era,
the gospel of Jesus Christ demanded a fuller social embodiment than nineteenth-century
Evangelical Protestantism had in the main imagined.

It is not this contention that separates Rauschenbusch and his time from
ours. If anything, his critique of industrial America and his vision of a more
socially robust faith have, over the course of the past three decades, won
the day among Christians across the great divides.

Huge Chasm

Take, for instance, this prudent, intelligent warning, issued in 1912: “A
private business that employs thousands of people, uses the natural resources
of the nation, enjoys exemptions and privileges at law, and is essential to
the welfare of great communities is not a private business. It is public, and
the sooner we abandon the fiction that it is private, the better for our good
sense.” A century later, corporate capitalism’s disastrous ecological
record alone makes Rauschenbusch’s point difficult to argue with.

But it is the title of the book in which this quotation appears that underscores
the huge chasm between his day and ours: Christianizing the Social Order.
Rauschenbusch and his companions fervently believed that what he termed the “principle
of association” inherent in the gospel was in their day making the United
States progressively more Christian.

“Perhaps these nineteen centuries of Christian influence have been
a long preliminary stage of growth, and now the flower and fruit are almost
here,” he intoned in the closing paragraph of 1907’s Christianity
and the Social Crisis. The gospel that he and the others preached was,
for them, both manifestation and catalyst of the grand, world-historical transformation
they believed to be underway.

It was a powerful, if transient, vision, as Christopher H. Evans’s
study makes clear, and his sympathetic portrait of Rauschenbusch gives an illuminating
sense of both the excitement and the confusion of the age. Rauschenbusch fought,
Evans shows, to advance the older understanding of personal salvation alongside
the need for “social salvation.” In Evans’s words, Rauschenbusch “genuinely
sought a theological integration between a spirit-filled evangelicalism centered
on individual renewal and a liberal theology that insisted on the ethical renewal
of society.”

What, precisely, did Rauschenbusch mean by “individual renewal”?
And what did “liberal theology” then entail? Precision in articulating
these (one would assume) biographically and theologically fundamental matters
unfortunately eludes Evans, a professor of church history at Rauschenbusch’s
own Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, throughout his study. That Evans
is lauding Rauschenbusch for his “liberalism” is apparent. But
just what Rauschenbusch at the height of his influence believed about, for
instance, the deity of Christ, or his resurrection, is less than clear.

Academic Vision

More clear is Evans’s concern to elevate Rauschenbusch as a champion
of progressive politics, a forefather in the development of the moral vision
that Evans here, in awkward academic cadences, advances. Even in exposing Rauschenbusch
for the man of the times he was—he was “chauvinistic” in
his view of women, Evans feels compelled to point out, and a would-be imposer
of middle-class sensibilities on the lower classes—Evans both clears
himself of any possible suspicion of his own (similar) moral poverty and shows
us the direction that Rauschenbusch’s more enlightened heirs have taken.

“Although he did not go as far as some of his contemporaries in his
idealization of women,” Evans writes in a typical passage, “his
message was nevertheless clear: the task of realizing the kingdom of God in
America was the primary task of married women who insured the well-being of
the nation through their roles as wives and mothers.”

This approach to biography has a certain formulaic quality; the main task
becomes to score the subject’s understanding of the world against the
biographer’s own (or, as seems to be true in this case, that of the academic
and theological community the biographer is concerned to please), dutifully
noting all points of departure while underlining the ways in which the hero
was preparing the way for a new day. How does this earlier form of Protestant
progressivism match up with our own? This seems to be the driving question
in this story.

There are other ways for a biographer to go, ways that honor more fully the
deep, human dimensions of any life, regardless of time or place. If biography
affords the opportunity for anything, it is the chance for long and hard wrestling
with another human being and his moment in time.

Who was Walter Rauschenbusch? Who are we? How do this
man and his moment help us to see more clearly our own lot, our own circumstance,
our own possibilities? One leaves Evans’s book wishing he had allowed
such questions to seep deeper into his own authorial vision. But instead of
finding the fundamental assumptions of our own age challenged by his study,
we mainly find them confirmed.

Left Wondering

So we are left wondering what it really would have been like to sit under
Rauschenbusch’s preaching, or to dine with his family, or simply to have
a conversation with him. Rauschenbusch once wrote that “to concentrate
our efforts on personal salvation, as orthodoxy has done, or on soul culture,
as liberalism has done, comes close to refined selfishness,” adding that “a
religion which realizes in God the bond that binds all men together can create
the men who will knit the social order together as an organized brotherhood.”

This is no mean observation. Who was the man who made it? After reading Evans’s
book, I would like very much to know.

Eric Miller is an Associate Professor of History at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania (www.geneva.edu). He is writing a biography of Christopher Lasch.

“Social Gospel Apostle” first appeared in the December 2005 issue of Touchstone. If you enjoyed this article, you'll find more of the same in every issue.

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